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AT THE MOVIES

AT THE MOVIES; Working Plenty And Loving It

By Dave Kehr

Published: November 3, 2000

''I'm a bit of a workhorse,'' said Laura Linney, the versatile Juilliard-schooled actress who has brought her craft to projects as diverse as ''Uncle Vanya'' on Broadway, ''Tales of the City'' on television and ''The Truman Show'' in the movies. ''I made four films last summer. I went from one to another, and I just loved it.''

Two of those films are opening in the next few weeks, and both are generating Oscar talk. The first, which opens in New York next Friday, is Kenneth Lonergan's ''You Can Count on Me,'' in which Ms. Linney plays the lead, a loan officer in a New England town who receives an unexpected visit from her emotionally dependent brother (Mark Ruffalo).

The second is ''The House of Mirth,'' a period adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel in which Ms. Linney is part of a large ensemble cast under the direction of the British filmmaker Terence Davies (''Distant Voices, Still Lives''). That film will open at Christmas.

''I made these films literally back to back,'' Ms. Linney said. ''I finished 'You Can Count on Me' and I got on a plane and flew to Scotland and started the next day. To go between two wildly different roles in two wildly different scripts, filmed in different countries -- I love having those kinds of challenges. To have to stretch, and stretch quickly.

''Kenny is more intimately involved with the actors, with the smaller moments, and is gentler on the set. Terence is passionate and very involved, but there's a different feel between the two of them.''

In ''You Can Count on Me'' Ms. Linney projects a vulnerable quality at odds with the confident women she is often called on to play. ''What I responded to is that here are two adults who are still really struggling to grow up, dealing with amusing and frustrating issues about themselves and their lives,'' she said. ''They're extremely close siblings who lost their parents at a very early age. I think between the two of them they make one whole human being.''

''You alter how you work from film to film,'' Ms. Linney observed. ''Part of the fun for me is trying to figure out what a particular script demands. If I take the same approach on everything, it's not interesting, and it doesn't give a unique experience to each job. My imagination goes a little dull.''

Ms. Linney isn't slowing down soon. ''I still have the acting bug, pretty strongly. I work in television, I still do stage, I work all over the place, and I find that gratifying because I never take any of it for granted, not for one second.''

China's Changing Guard

There's an important transition under way in the Chinese cinema. The so-called Fifth Generation filmmakers -- including directors like Chen Kaige (''Farewell My Concubine'') and Zhang Yimou (''Raise the Red Lantern''), who first broke away from Maoist constraints and into the international market -- are giving way to their younger, more experimental colleagues in the Sixth Generation. Directors like Wang Xiaoshuai (''So Close to Paradise''), Jia Zhang Ke (''Platform'') and Lou Ye -- whose ''Suzhou River'' opens on Wednesday at the Film Forum in the South Village -- are more aggressive in their politics, more adventurous in their filmmaking styles and more personal in their points of view.

''I make films for myself,'' Mr. Lou said through an interpreter while visiting New York. ''The Fifth Generation filmmakers have a lot of money behind them. But I can also feel a lot of limitations in their films, especially the recent ones. I can feel what they wanted to say, but they can't say it entirely. Money is a good thing, though it can also shut your mouth.''

Doing away with such Fifth Generation conventions as a period setting, luscious costumes and the glamorous star Gong Li, ''Suzhou River'' interweaves two different love stories -- between a motorcycle messenger and a rich girl, and a videographer and a showgirl who performs as a mermaid -- and complicates matters further by having both women played by the same actress, Zhou Xun.

As a student at the Film Academy in Beijing, where his classmates included Mr. Wang and Mr. Jia, Mr. Lou saw Russian, Japanese and European films and retained a fondness for films of the French New Wave. ''Those masterpieces we saw were all made on very little money,'' said Mr. Lou, who wrote his dissertation on Michelangelo Antonioni. ''So you remember what the Europeans did.''

Second Chance

It's rare that a Hollywood studio admits to making a mistake, and even more rare that a studio does something to correct it. But that's what Paramount is doing with ''Wonder Boys.'' The drama of academic life, directed by Curtis Hanson (''L.A. Confidential'') and starring Michael Douglas as an English professor coping with difficult students and a writing block, performed disappointingly when it was released last February, despite mostly positive reviews. (An exception was the review in The New York Times.) But Paramount will re-release the film on Wednesday with a new trailer and advertising campaign that the studio hopes will attract the audience that stayed away the first time.

''There was a lot of discussion, disagreement and conjecture among all the players about both the original release date and the original campaign,'' Mr. Hanson said by phone from Los Angeles. ''The date that was picked was the week after the Oscar nominations came out. But no one who was advocating that date predicted that 'American Beauty' and 'The Cider House Rules' would be the two pictures that dominated, pictures that arguably play to more or less the same audience that our picture would play to.

''You had these two pictures with all the media buzz and, of course, the money being poured in when the nominations came out. And then you had our movie competing with them with an ad campaign that was ridiculed in the press.

''In the midst of glowing reviews,'' Mr. Hanson laughed, ''critics were taking time out to do a little number on how the campaign misrepresented the film. When it opened to disappointing numbers and to really great reviews, it didn't take long for Paramount executives Sherry Lansing and Rob Friedman to say, 'Not only should we have done better, but maybe we could do better.' ''

The studio quickly canceled the video release and designed a new campaign that lets audiences in on the fact that Mr. Douglas's co-stars include Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr. and Katie Holmes.

''As a big-screen guy,'' Mr. Hanson said, ''I'm thrilled that people, whatever number of them, will have the opportunity to view the movie in theaters. The video and all that will come out next year.''